For the longest time I have been putting off making these amazing little treats. Well folks today I committed to it and man, not only did I pull it off I nailed it! Follow this recipe if you are looking to make some of these treats for yourself!

First off! Start soaking the cornhusk!

Then cube up 4lb of pork butt and sautéed in a Dutch oven with 2 TBS of olive oil until golden brown. Once I achieved the majestic beautiful golden brown color, I added 2 cups of Knorr beef broth (next time ima do 4 cups) ½ of a white onion diced and 1 bayleaf. Then I covered it for 2 ½ hours on medium-low heat until that pork butt was falling apart! Then I shredded the pork separating the fat from the meat.

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The next part of this process is a not 100% authentic but you gotta do what you gotta do! When making tamales you need to make a binder for the meat and typically it is made out of whole Mexican chilies. Well being the lazy person I am I did not want to travel the store to buy chilies so started digging around my spice cabinet and found a 4oz packet of ground New Mexico and Guajillo chili powder that I mixed with about ¼ cup of olive oil to create a paste. Oh, and one last thing, I added 1 TBS of cumin powder to the mixture as well. Once the adhesive was built I added it to the meat (next time I will add only ¾ of the paste).

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While the meat and chili paste was sitting, I built my corn dough for the tamales! This was stress but a fun time to experiment. What made it stressful is I did not have any idea how much dough to make and there are hundreds of different ways to make this corn dough. So here is what I did; first I measured out 2/5 lbs of Maseca masa (bought it at Wal-mart). Then I melted 1 pound of lard (next time I will do 2lbs) and added to the masa. The first thing I noticed was that was not enough lard to bring the masa from a flowery consistency to a cake batter consistency, so I added 2 cups of warm beef broth and the leftover rendered fat from the pork that I removed from the Dutch oven before shredding the pork. That finally did it for me, and I had created this beautiful batter that I used to begin filling my soften cornhusk with. When loading the cornhusk with the masa, I applied the masa to the side of the cornhusk that felt soft (you will be able to tell which side is soft). Furthermore, the rule of thumb that I use was I wanted my masa spread to be about the size of my hand, I have little hands so about the size of a postcard. The other aspect of the masa spread was that it was about 1/8 of an inch thick. After I finished creating this beautiful bed of masa in the cornhusk I added my pork mixture and then wrapped it up!

I added the leftover scrap cornhusk to the bottom of my stem pot to help protect the tamale from the boiling water and then placed my tamales in the container. I made sure that all the tamale opening were facing up and then proceeded to steam them for 1 hour and 45 minutes before checking for doneness. To tell if a tamale is done, unwrap it, it the masa sticks to the cornhusk it is not done if it does not stick then it is done!

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The last thing I did was prepare a sauce for the tamales. I used one small can of Las Palmas red enchilada sauce mixed with 1 TS of knorrs beef broth with 1/3 cup of water. I just heated it up in the microwave and stirred it.

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Total number of tamales - 35

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